Fiction Podcast: Richard Ford Reads Harold Brodkey

“One doesn’t think about Harold Brodkey anymore,” says Richard Ford, who reads Harold Brodkey’s 1954 story “The State of Grace” on this month’s Fiction Podcast, but “there was a time when the words ‘Harold’ and ‘Brodkey’ were on everybody’s lips in New York.” “The State of Grace” was Brodkey’s first published story. He claimed to have written it in forty-five minutes, and it appeared when he was only twenty-four, but, as Ford says, it contains “moments of great virtuosity” and an early taste of the writer’s interest in portraying “life seen from the inside of someone’s mind.”

“The State of Grace” is told in the voice of a young man looking back on his adolescent years in St. Louis, when his father was slowly dying in a hospital and he felt alienated from his mother and isolated from his peers. As he casts himself back into his thirteen-year-old self, he fluctuates, as adolescents do, between harsh self-criticism and high self-regard. He finds refuge in the company of a seven-year-old child he babysits, “a precocious and delicate little boy, quivering with the malaise of being unloved.” Together, they escape their loneliness and feelings of inadequacy:

When we played, his child’s heart would come into its own, and the troubled world where his vague hungers went unfed, and mothers and fathers were dim and far away—too far away ever to reach in and touch the sore place and make it heal—would disappear, along with the world where I was not sufficiently muscled or sufficiently gallant to earn my own regard.

You can hear Ford’s reading of Brodkey’s story, and a discussion with our fiction editor, Deborah Treisman, by listening above or by downloading the podcast for free from iTunes.

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